DOSTOYEVSKY'S UNABOMBER

This article is available to subscribers only, in our archive viewer. Get immediate access to this article for just $1 a week by subscribing now.

ABSTRACT: A CRITIC AT LARGE about Dostoyevsky's “Crime and Punishment” and the philosophical resemblance between its antihero, Raskolnikov, and the Unabomber. What feels alien in American crime is the philosophical criminal of exceptional intelligence and humanitarian purpose, who commits murder out of uncompromising idealism. Then came the Unabomber. The melodramatic publication of his manifesto revealed him to be a visionary, a calculating social reasoner and messianic Utopian. The philosopher is one with the murderer. In the Unabomber, America has its own Raskolnikov. Like the Unabomber, Raskolnikov is a theorist who publishes a notorious essay. In “Crime and Punishment” Dostoyevsky argued against the radicals who were dominant among Russian intellectuals in the 1860s, many of them espousing nihilist views. Their timing was incongruous: the czar was the moderate Alexander II. Dostoyevsky's mixture of contempt for the radicals and solicitude for their misguided humanity led to the fashioning of Raskolnikov. He was out to expose the entire spectrum of current radical thought. Raskolnikov robs and murders a pawnbroker, an unpleasant and predatory old woman. Since she has left her money to the church, her death will help many others. This theory — Benthamite utilitarianism — was current among the Russian intelligentsia. In supplying Bentham with an axe, Dostoyevsky revealed the poisonous fruit of a political philosophy based on reason alone. Dostoyevsky also attacks Utopian socialism (gently) and nihilism (brutally). But the irony of his life remains: the Slavophile religious believer was in his twenties a Westernizing Russian liberal, a radical and nihilist. Dostoyevsky was raised by small landowners who were unusually religious for their class. His father, a doctor, sent his sons to the Academy of Military Engineers. Two years later, the doctor was found murdered by his serfs. This freed Dostoyevsky to pursue a literary career; his first novel, “Poor Folk,” inspired the sponsorship of the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky. Dostoyevsky's arrogance made him the object of mockery by Turgenev and he left the circle. He joined another socialist group hosted by Petrashevsky. Dostoyevsky aligned himself with the more radical members, and, following a reading of Belinsky's letter to Gogol criticizing serfdom, was arrested. Nicholas I personally ordered a mock execution, a last-minute reprieve (the enduringly traumatic event of Dostoyevsky's life), and transport to Siberia. Dostoyevsky's sentence was eight years. After his release, he married a widow with tuberculosis. His own epilepsy worsened. He underwent a conversion: in the faces of the peasant convicts, he saw a divine illumination — the true Russia. He fought doubt with passionate unreason. With his brother, Mikhail, Dostoyevsky founded a periodical intended to combat the socialist radicals, which was closed down by the censors. Soon afterward, Dostoyevsky's wife died; then Mikhail. Dostoyevsky went bankrupt, and, in 1867, fled to the West to escape his creditors, and remarried. He broke with Turgenev, Belinsky, and Petrashevsky because he believed they did not love Russia enough. Dostoyevsky died in January 1881, a literary eminence. Many motives exist for Raskolnikov's crime: family, society, altruism, utilitarianism, socialism, nihilism, raw Napoleonic domination. Why so many? Critics have suggested polyphony, schizophrenia, existentialism, Oedipal revolt. The novel is not a polemical tract, a detective thriller, a social protest, or even a “psychological novel.” Its strangeness is that of a centaur pulling a droshky full of groaning souls; a phantasmagoria. In the fever of his imagining, it is not the radicals whom Dostoyevsky finally rebukes but the Devil himself, an unconquerable prinicipality pitted against God.